2 added miniatures in colours and gold, with 2 initials overpainted with the arms of England and Bohun (ff. 1, 102v).

Official foliation

ff. 310 (+ 4 unfoliated modern paper flyleaves and 2 unfoliated medieval parchment flyleaves at the beginning and at the end)

Form

Parchment codex

Binding

BM/BL in-house. Rebound in 1973.

Provenance

The royal arms of England (e.g., ff. 60, 95), France (e.g., ff. 9, 266), and of Leon-Castile (ff. 295v, 301), some with incorrect tinctures.A member of the Bohun family, possibly Humphrey of Bohun (d. 1373), 11th earl of Hereford, Essex and Northampton or his daughter Eleanor (d. 1399): the Bohun arms (f. 102) with those of England (f. 1) painted over the original initials.Thomas [Thomas of Woodstock], duke of Gloucester (b. 1355, d. 1397), the seventh son of Edward III, married to Eleanor Bohun: perhaps to be identified with 'un large livre en Frannceis appellez le Romance de Lancelot' in the inventory of his possessions seized at Pleshey by Richard II after Thomas's arrest and murder Large shelfmark '2' (unfoliated parchment flyleaf at the beginning).The Old Royal Library (the English Royal Library): perhaps to be identified with 'Lancelot du Lac' included in the list of books at Richmond Palace of 1535, no. 99; added title 'Le second volume de Lancelot', 17th century (f. 1) corresponding to the entry in the catalogue of 1666, Royal Appendix 71, f. 11v.Presented to the British Museum by George II in 1757 as part of the Old Royal Library.

Notes

Full digital coverage available for this manuscript: see Digitised Manuscripts at http://www.bl.uk/manuscripts.The text is the third part, i.e. the Lancelot section, of the five-part Lancelot-Grail romance in French prose.Catchwords, quire signatures.

Select bibliography

H. Oskar Sommer, Le Roman de Merlin or the Early History of King Arthur (London: Privately printed, 1894), facing p. xxiv.

Lucy Freeman Sandler, 'The Illustration of the Psalms in Fourteenth-Century English Manuscripts: Three Psalters of the Bohun Family', in Reading Texts and Images: Essays on Medieval and Renaissance Art and Patronage in Honour of Margaret M. Manion, ed. by Bernard J. Muir (Exeter: University of Exeter Press, 2002), 123-51 (p. 124 n. 5).

Alison Stones, 'Mise en Page in the French Lancelot-Grail: the First 150 years of the Illustrative Tradition' in A Companion to the Lancelot-Grail Cycle, ed. by Carol Dover (Woodbridge: D. S. Brewer, 2003), 125-144 (pp. 131, 134, 137).

James P. Carley, The Books of King Henry VIII and His Wives, preface by David Starkey (London: British Library, 2004), p. 36, pls 28, 29.